My friend Joshua, a writer, and myself, a designer by trade and painter by preference, used to have studios down the hall from each other. Every morning, we’d engage in a pre-work ritual of coffee and rambling talk about about art, literature and music. In other words, we’d shoot the shit about Agnes Martin, David Foster Wallace and Tom Waits. After one ranging back and forth about the puzzling diction of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Joshua said, “You gotta meet my friend Michael. He’s really into this.”

What I didn’t know at the time was that Michael was the founder and artistic director of the Gift Theatre, an ambitious, 27 seat storefront theatre in the out of the way neighborhood of Jefferson Park. And I didn’t know that he was an award-winning actor and director and writer. And that he had accomplished all of this after after almost dying from two spinal strokes and being paralyzed from the waist down. And that he was looking for someone to handle the theatre’s graphic design. So when we finally met at a blue-collar dive a block from the Gift, I was inspired by what he had been able to do and what we wanted to do with the Gift. So I jumped at the chance to work with him.